vanilla tea

once, when I lived in Rwanda, my mom sent me a package and inside it were several kinds of tea. My favorite two were vanilla hazelnut and vanilla. When the teabags she sent ran out, I started buying these little tubes of vanilla essence at the Baguette in Kigali which is no longer called the Baguette and has not been since I before arrived in Rwanda and is actually called La Gallette or something silly like that, but which I still call the Baguette because everyone else does. A drop or two of the vanilla essence (which comes four tubes to a pack for 1000 FRw) makes tea exactly perfect, with lots of Nido and some sugar. It does not work so well in the US because skim milk does not serve the same function as full cream milk powder. But I'm back in Africa, baby, and the vanilla tea is back and it's good. Really good.